of falling greatly below what an enlightened mind would figure to
itself as lowest in man. A more shocking monument, indeed, there
cannot be than this, of the infinity by which man may descend
below his own capacities of grandeur: the gods, in some systems of
religion, have been such and so monstrous by excesses of wickedness,
as to insure, if annually one hour of periodical eclipse should
have left them at the mercy of man, a general rush from their own
worshippers for strangling them as mad dogs. Hypocrisy, the cringing
of sycophants, and the credulities of fear, united to conceal this
misotheism; but we may be sure that it was widely diffused through
the sincerities of the human heart. An intense desire for kicking
Jupiter, or for hanging him, if found convenient, must have lurked
in the honorable Koman heart, before the sincerity of human nature
could have extorted upon the Roman stage a public declaration,--that
their supreme gods were capable of enormities which a poor,
unpretending human creature [homuncio] would have disdained. Many
times the ideal of the divine nature, as adopted by pagan races,
fell under the contempt, not only of men superior to the national
superstition, but of men partaking in that superstition. Yet, with
all those drawbacks, an ideal _was_ an ideal. The being set
up for adoration as god, _was_ such upon the whole to the
worshipper; since, if there had been any higher mode of excellence
conceivable for _him_, that higher mode would have virtually
become his deity. It cannot be doubted, therefore, that the nature
of the national divinities indicated the qualities which ranked
highest in the national estimation; and that being contemplated
continually in the spirit of veneration, these qualities must have
worked an extensive conformity to their own standard. The mythology
sanctioned by the ritual of public worship, the features of moral
nature in the gods distributed through that mythology, and sometimes